The Clearest Voice: Remembering Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

“We singers die two deaths: the death of the voice, then the death of the body.” I’m quoting from memory, but these words, from the documentary “Autumn Journey,” about the German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, came back to me this morning with the news that this epochal musician is gone. It’s one of those deaths that resonate through one for days after, and seem to require some act of personal commemoration. As soon as I heard, I reached down his recordings with Gerald Moore of nearly every song Schubert wrote. I was given this monumental boxed set, twenty-five CDs in all, for my twenty-first birthday, and, with the single-mindedness of someone who doesn’t yet have a job, listened my way through the whole thing. So, like countless people, I got to know German lieder through Fischer-Dieskau, and for me he simply is the voice of Schubert (and Schumann and Wolf and so on).

What made Fischer-Dieskau so special? There are any number of reasons, but none really seem sufficient. It didn’t hurt that his career, running from the last days of the Second World War until the early nineteen-nineties, spanned a golden age for recorded music. Then there was the technique. Singing buffs will tell you that the extraordinary thing about him was that his voice was neither particularly beautiful in itself nor nearly as big as he managed to make it sound. The genius lay not in the basic vocal instrument but in the way he used it. Some of them even find his approach too cerebral and calculating: pay them no mind, and listen instead to the passion, unforced power, and climactic high A in this 1956 performance of Schumann’s “Ich Grolle Nicht”:

One gets some sense of the technical side of things in “Autumn Journey,” in scenes where Fischer-Dieskau teaches apprentice signers in master classes. In one sequence (sadly not online, though the DVD is available secondhand), he keeps pressing a burly baritone to push the sound forward in his head into the sinuses. After much trying, the young singer briefly achieves the desired effect and one hears the sound come into focus. To my ears, the singer seemed pretty decent before, but the transformation is a revelation: suddenly the music becomes truly communicative and we hear an intelligence behind the notes.

This intelligence seems key to Fischer-Dieskau’s art. He was renowned for the clarity of his diction and you always feel he knows exactly what text of a song is about. Indeed, he’s so attuned to the fervent emotions of German lyric poetry—all those mountains, brooks, millers, maidens, and deaths—that you almost feel he might have written the poem in a previous life. He seems to be inside each song, speaking with the voice of both the composer and poet. So powerful is this aspect of his singing that you can see the mind working even when he isn’t singing. Take a look at the first fifteen seconds of this performance, where he’s simply listening to the piano accompaniment before his first entrance. You can read the events in the music all over his face:

Similarly, the almost frightening level of focus in his face as he finishes singing here (at the 3:35 mark):

But maybe “intelligence” is too small a word to capture this aspect of Fischer-Dieskau, because it’s a trait that also comprises emotion, personality, humor, and a kind of nobility. Last fall, a young German soprano I know said something that perhaps gets closer to the specialness involved. I had put on the “Autumn Journey” documentary, and there was some footage from a Bach cantata very early in Fischer-Dieskau’s career. Before he even opened his mouth, she gasped and said, “Just the way he stands. It’s so honest.”